Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-dnltx Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T12:35:33.847Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Writing International Relations from the invisible side of the abyssal line

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 September 2017

Zeynep Gülşah Çapan
Zeynep Gülşah Çapan*
Affiliation:
Lecturer, International Relations, Istanbul Bilgi University
*
* Correspondence to: Zeynep Gülşah Çapan, Istanbul Bilgi University, Emniyettepe Mahallesi, Kazim Karabekir Cd. No. 2, 34060, Eyup, Istanbul, Turkey. Author’s email: zgulsah@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The article discusses the manner in which the story of the international system and the relationship between violence and civilisation that Andrew Linklater tells in Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems remains on the visible side of the absyssal line. Absyssal thinking refers to the distinctions created between visible and invisible realms and it is Eurocentrism as a system of knowledge that sustains and reproduces this abyssal line. The article will focus on two instances of reproducing this abyssal line. The first will be with respect to the way in which histories of Europe and colonialism are detached from each other. The second will be on where political and moral ‘progress’ is being located within the development of the ‘global civilizing process’.

Keywords

EurocentrismHistoryAbyssal Line
Type
Forum: Linklater’s Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 602 - 611
Copyright
© British International Studies Association 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Linklater, Andrew, Violence and Civilization in the Western States-Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., p. 7.

3 Hobson, John, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Sabaratnam, Meera, ‘Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace’, Security Dialogue, 44 (2013), pp. 259–278 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bilgin, Pinar, ‘How to remedy Eurocentrism in IR? A complement and a challenge for The Global Transformation’, International Theory, 8 (2016), pp. 492–501 Google Scholar; Bilgin, Pinar, The International in Security, Security in the International (New York and London: Routledge, 2016)Google Scholar; Grovogui, Siba, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy: Memories of International Institutions and Order (New York: Palgrave, 2006)Google Scholar; Shilliam, Robbie (ed.), International Relations and Non-Western Thought: Imperialism, Colonialism and Investigations of Global Modernity (New York; London: Routledge, 2010)Google Scholar. Also see Julian Go and George Lawson’s contributions to this forum on Andrew Linklater’s Violence and Civilization.

4 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 442.

5 Ibid., p. 447.

6 Amin, Samir, Eurocentrism (New York: Monthly Review, 1989)Google Scholar.

7 Wallerstein, Immanuel, ‘Eurocentrism and its avatars: the dilemmas of social science’, Sociological bulletin, 46 (1997), pp. 21–39 Google Scholar.

8 Sabaratnam, ‘Avatars of Eurocentrism in the critique of the liberal peace’.

9 de Sousa Santos, Boaventura, ‘Beyond abyssal thinking: From global lines to ecologies of knowledges’, Review (Fernand Braudel Center) (2007), pp. 45–89 (p. 45)Google Scholar.

10 de Sousa Santos, ‘Beyond abyssal thinking’, pp. 45–6.

11 Linklater, Violence and Civilization.

12 Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics, p.10.

13 Bernal, Martin, Black Athena: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987)Google Scholar. For the debates surrounding his argument, see Moore, David Chionia (ed.), Black Athena Writes Back: Martin Bernal Responds to his Critics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Orrells, Daniel, Bhambra, Gurminder K., and Roynon, Tessa, African Athena: New Agendas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)Google Scholar. Fischer also notes the ‘possibility that the Caribbean plantation zone and the events of the Haitian Revolution might have been the environment where European Enlightenment ideas about Egypt were transfigured into a popular liberationist theory that would have Egypt as one of its central elements’. See Fischer, Sibylle, Modernity Disavowed: Haiti and the Cultures of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

14 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)Google Scholar.

15 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 447.

16 Araújo, Marta and Maeso, Silvia, Eurocentrism, Racism and Knowledge: Debates on History and Power in Europe and the Americas (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)Google Scholar.

17 Bhambra, Gurminder, Rethinking Modernity: Postcolonialism and the Sociological Imagination (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)Google Scholar; Mignolo, Walter, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011)Google Scholar.

18 Bhambra, Gurminder, ‘Comparative historical sociology and the state: Problems of method’, Cultural Sociology, 10 (2016), pp. 335–351 Google Scholar. See also Barkawi, Tarak and Laffey, Mark, ‘Retrieving the imperial: Empire and international relations’, Millennium, 31 (2002), pp. 109–127 Google Scholar.

19 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 13.

20 Ibid., p. 442.

21 Bull, Hedley and Watson, Adam, The Expansion of International Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.

22 Zarakol, Ayse, After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Suzuki, Shogo, Civilization and Empire: China and Japan’s Encounter with European International Society (New York; London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar; Keene, Edward, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism and Order in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2002)Google Scholar; Seth, Sanjay, ‘Postcolonial theory and the critique of international relations’, Millennium, 40 (2011), pp. 167–183 Google Scholar.

23 Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

24 Wilder, Gary, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014)Google Scholar; Shilliam, Robbie, The Black Pacific: Anti-Colonial Struggles and Oceanic Connections (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015)Google Scholar; Hansen, Peo and Jonsson, Stefan, ‘Another colonialism: Africa in the history of European integration’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 27 (2014), pp. 442–461 Google Scholar; Shilliam, Robbie, ‘Ethiopianism, Englishness, Britishness: Struggles over imperial belonging’, Citizenship Studies, 20 (2016), pp. 243–259 Google Scholar; Coller, Ian, ‘Rousseau’s Turban: Entangled encounters of Europe and Islam in the Age of Enlightenment’, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, 40 (2014), pp. 56–77 Google Scholar.

25 For a recent discussion of Grovogui’s book, see Mamdani, Mahmood, ‘Introduction: a critique of Eurocentrism: Then and now’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 36 (2016), pp. 174–177 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Agathangelou, Anna M., ‘Archives are part of international knowledge, not merely happenstance in conversation with Siba Grovogui’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 36 (2016), pp. 204–212 Google Scholar; Lalu, Premesh, ‘Unlearning history Europe in the wake of African political thought’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 36 (2016), pp. 177–182 Google Scholar; George, Olakunle, ‘Postcolonial reverberations’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 36 (2016), pp. 195–203 Google Scholar; Mignolo, Walter, ‘The making and closing of Eurocentric international law the opening of a multipolar world order’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 36 (2016), pp. 182–195 Google Scholar.

26 Grovogui, Beyond Eurocentrism and Anarchy, p. 68.

27 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 442.

28 Ibid., p. 447.

29 Ibid., p. 357.

30 Ibid., p. 381.

31 Dussel, Enrique, ‘Eurocentrism and modernity (Introduction to the Frankfurt Lectures)’, boundary 2, 20 (1993), pp. 65–76 Google Scholar; Wynter, Sylvia, ‘1492: a new world view’, in Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (eds), Race, Discourse and the Americas: A New World View (Washington; London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), pp. 5–57 Google Scholar; Rabasa, José, Inventing America: Spanish Historiography and the Formation of Eurocentrism (University of Oklahoma Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

32 Maldonado-Torres, Nelson, ‘On the coloniality of being: Contributions to the development of a concept’, Cultural Studies, 21 (2007), pp. 240–270 Google Scholar.

33 Césaire, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., p. 37.

35 Ibid., p. 36.

36 de Sousa Santos, ‘Beyond abyssal thinking’.

37 Kühne, Thomas, ‘Colonialism and the Holocaust: Continuities, causations, and complexities’, Journal of Genocide Research, 15 (2013), pp. 339–362 Google Scholar; Erichsen, Casper and Olusoga, David, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism (London: Faber & Faber, 2010)Google Scholar; Zimmerer, Jürgen, ‘The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colonialism: a postcolonial perspective on the Nazi policy of conquest and extermination’, Patterns of Prejudice, 39 (2005), pp. 197–219 Google Scholar; Gordon, Michelle, ‘Colonial violence and Holocaust studies’, Holocaust Studies, 21 (2015), pp. 272–291 Google Scholar.

38 For further on Shark Island, see Erichsen, Casper W., ‘The Angel of Death Has Descended Violently Among Them’: Concentration Camps and Prisoners-of-War in Namibia, 1904–08 (Leiden: African Studies Centre, 2005)Google Scholar;

Erichsen and Olusoga, The Kaiser’s Holocaust.

39 De Haan, Ido, ‘Imperialism, colonialism and genocide: the Dutch case for an international history of the Holocaust’, BMGN-Low Countries Historical Review, 125 (2010)Google Scholar.

40 Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 36.

41 Linklater, Violence and Civilization, p. 306.

42 The section does not tell a linear story of the development and consequences of the Haitian Revolution, but rather, focuses on two instances of the story in order to discuss how the abyssal line can be crossed. For in-depth historical accounts of the Haitian Revolution, see Dubois, Laurent, Haiti: The Aftershocks of History (London: Macmillan, 2012)Google Scholar; Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Geggus, David, Haitian Revolutionary Studies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Geggus, David (ed.), The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Daut, Marlene, ‘Haitian Revolution’, in Sangeeta Ray et al. (eds), The Encyclopedia of Postcolonial Studies (Blackwell Publishing, 2016)Google Scholar.

43 Shilliam, Robbie, ‘Race and revolution at Bwa Kayiman’, Millennium (2017), available at doi: 0305829817693692 Google Scholar.

44 Dubois, Avengers of the New World.

45 Ibid., p. 74. See also Geggus, David, ‘Racial equality, slavery, and colonial secession during the Constituent Assembly’, The American Historical Review, 94 (1989), pp. 1290–1308 Google Scholar.

46 Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies; Geggus (ed.), The Impact of the Haitian Revolution; Daut, ‘Haitian Revolution’.

47 Bhambra, Gurminder, ‘Undoing the epistemic disavowal of the Haitian revolution: a contribution to global social thought’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 37 (2016), pp. 1–16 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48 Geggus, ‘Racial equality, slavery, and colonial secession during the Constituent Assembly’, p. 1304.

49 It should be noted that there are continuing historiographical debates about the time, place, and participants of the Boukman Ceremony. For further details, see Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies.

50 Dubois, Avengers of the New World, p. 43.

51 Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies.

52 James, C. L. R., The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 86 Google Scholar.

53 Geggus, Haitian Revolutionary Studies.

54 Ibid., p. 91.

55 Geggus, ‘Racial equality, slavery, and colonial secession during the Constituent Assembly’, p. 1308.

56 Mignolo, Walter, ‘DELINKING: The rhetoric of modernity, the logic of coloniality and the grammar of de-coloniality 1’, Cultural Studies, 21 (2007), pp. 449–514 Google Scholar; de Sousa Santos, ‘Beyond abyssal thinking’.